Daiki Media
Conversion optimization

Are you ready to learn all the best practices your eCommerce site needs to be successful? I have the scoop for you. Save weeks of your life trying to optimize your CRO by following these tips, rather than doing mindless A/B tests and studying site heat maps or analytic changes week over week. Reading this one article will help you be efficient, earn more money, and impress your other business friends with your rapid growth.

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Digital Marketing has become a buzz word in a world where COVID overrun 2020. Even one year later, we are still moving through a lot of uncertainty. Why did Digital Marketing become such a big topic during this time?

The power of online content has skyrocketed. As the owner of Daiki Media agency, a Digital Marketing Malaysia company, it is my job to make sure that I know the latest information to help our clients succeed. As part of this exciting opportunity (because learning is my favorite hobby), I’ve taken additional courses in Digital Marketing this year so you can skip all the optimization testing and get what works quickly.

The below advice and tips were learned from a course from the CXL Conversion Optimization Minidegree and personal experience with what has worked for our clients.

Best Practices Your eCommerce Site Needs to Convert

First things first, make sure your homepage is ready to sell. Your website needs to explain three things quickly:

  1. What can I do with your company?
  2. Why should I? (Go into what need the product helps with)
  3. Why are you different or better than someone else doing the same thing?

If someone can’t figure out what you sell and why they should buy, they won’t convert. We’ll talk more about the design and sales copy content next.

Before we do, if you think your website does not meet the recommendations we suggest evolving your design slowly rather than making dramatic sweeping changes. Make sure you do research to understand the weakest areas of your site before making radical design changes. This will help prevent you from needing to start from scratch on multiple occasions because you made a mistake or two. Focus on a design that evolves with your brand.

Persuasive Design and Copy for CRO

Part of the conversion rate strategy is keeping things simple. Use smaller paragraphs of no more than four lines, add the value above the fold, and minimizing the amount of CTAs per page. If there is too much to do and it looks busy, customers will abandon the page before they figure out what to do.

Tips for Simple Design and Content (Your First Step):

  • Put the most important content at the top
  • Help people move down the page by creating lists and subheadings
  • Give visual cues to what readers should pay attention to
  • Use familiar “traditional” fonts like Arial, Georgia, or Tahoma (don’t overuse script fonts)
  • One action per screen (keep decision fatigue at bay)
  • Make sure your CTA is visible on the page
  • Leave whitespace (AKA negative space) around the CTA so it draws the eye
  • All button colors should contrast with the main website color to stand out
  • Keep body text 16x
  • Make sure your photos are large. If a person is in the photo, make sure the smile isn’t cheesy
  • Keep each line 50–75 characters
  • Your website should hold multiple category pages, rather than putting everything on the homepage
  • Have separate FAQ pages that answer common questions without focusing on sales copy

Part of effective websites that properly utilize conversion rate optimizations are sites that show visual hierarchies. Text, formatting, font sizes, and colors help determine the most important content on each page. When you do a site audit, analyze where your eyes go on each page and see if it’s the most important thing the customer should see.

Digital Marketing Conversion Tactics for Easy Shopping

If you have an eCommerce shop with many products, follow these tips so that your customer can find what they need and be compelled to shop again. The goal is to make it easy for the customer to find what they need. A frustrated customer will not come back.

Your Shop Pages Should Have:

  1. Filters so your products are sortable
  2. Availability to sort by price (high to low and low to high), rating, and most popular
  3. Product badges to differentiate new products, limited editions, or top-rated reviews
  4. Multiple images per product, especially to show different color varieties
  5. Product images available on the search page
  6. Breadcrumbs to help customers know where to navigate next like “Customers who bought this also bought this”
  7. Search functions that aren’t thrown off by typos
  8. Options visible rather than “no results” after searching
  9. A very visible checkout or cart page

Payment Options for Customers:

  • Test prices with new customers to determine your optimal price point like multiple offers at different prices, decoy pricing, anchoring, decoy + anchoring
  • Make long-term commitment options like “ship every three months for 10% off” to encourage additional purchases
  • If your pricing is variable, offer a quote calculator earlier in the process so the customer is not surprised by the final price
  • Have the ability to switch between currency types if you ship internationally
  • Address possible objections (Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt = FUDs) on the pricing page

See more payment options and tips in our next section on Checkout Page Optimizations.

Signup and Lead Form Page Strategies

Just as product sales need certain treatments, so do your signup and form pages. If a customer can sign up to receive or send information to you, follow these important guidelines.

Checkout Page Optimizations:

  • Offer guest checkout to avoid cart abandonment
  • If someone used checkout, invite them to create an account on the checkout page
  • Create an incentive to do so by adding a coupon for their next order as a registering bonus
  • Utilize secure logins with social media login options
  • Registered customers should have the option to autocomplete options like addresses in their next order
  • Have a coupon page area but don’t overemphasize it
  • Test different ‘add to cart’ button designs to see what stands out most to your customers
  • Have payment methods other than adding a credit card, like using PayPal, Amazon, or Google Pay checkout
  • Adding your payment method should be the last step
  • If someone uses the crest card payment method, make adding the card information look like a credit card format to avoid confusion and help customers add info quickly
  • Reinforce purchase perks like free shipping and return policies or product guarantees
  • Show SSL and encryption security features to gain trust

Engaging Forms All Have:

  1. Have trust badges visible on payment pages
  2. Clear expectations so customers know what to expect by filling it out and what part of the process they are in
  3. Use minimum amount of information to fill by avoiding listing optional forms
  4. If for some reason you can’t avoid optional sections, specify what is required vs what is optional clearly
  5. Forms that are long should be spread across multiple pages
  6. Use a progress bar so customers know how much more is left to fill
  7. Start your form with the easiest content to fill in
  8. If there are dropdown options, use the least amount of choices possible
  9. Pre-fill what you can, like asking for zip code and having that fill in the city
  10. Validate addresses and other inline form validation in real-time

Final Digital Marketing Tips for Converting Customers Online

We are in the home stretch of this article now. Have you enjoyed it so far? Make sure to take notes as you are reading and save this article to go back to when you implement the website strategies.

We have a few more tips here for you that will help you continue to improve your site and keep customers engaged. One of them is more technical — website speed. If your site loads too slowly (especially if you have many photos), you are likely to have higher bounce rates. Keeping your service response time under 200ms and monitoring your site speed with Google Tag Manager is essential. Do not let any element of your page take more than a second to load.

Once you have that in place, be sure to continue to measure the success of your site in multiple ways. If you encourage customers to call you, use these tracking techniques:

  • Have your offer above the fold as well as below the fold for customers that went exploring
  • Use a unique phone number on each social channel, advertisement type, and on your business listing so you can track which page is converting more customers
  • If you are unable to use call tracking, create a “click to reveal” phone number and tie it to a Google Analytics event to DIY a similar method

Last but not least, if your website features a lot of content in articles, have a search box that is big and noticeable on each page so customers can find exactly what they are looking for. Search is helpful not only for a large product based websites but across multiple industries.

Now, you are probably full of ideas and tested strategies to optimize your conversions and influence your Digital Marketing. Evolve your website with time using this content so that your business grows in 2021.

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